Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the …
This week I have been reading a not-so well-known book of philosophy by the British philosopher Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons. Parfit is flagged up in Tim Morton's Hyperobjects, in which Morton comments on Parfit's challenging of 'long-held prejudices about utility and ethics from within utilitarianism itself.' that, 'Parfit showed that no self-interest ethical …
Haven't written a poem for a while, but this has emerged in the last few weeks. Very much a sensory response manifesting out of my studies into my actual encounters & affiliation with a world of objects, object-sound, object-smell, object-taste. between noisescapesilence the extractor fan in the bathroom is too loud its loudness …
Another poem written after I returned from Korea. This poem is an attempt to realize poetically, Tim Morton's replacement term for 'nature', the symbiotic real. Morton's reasons for abandoning the word nature & the (capital N) baggage with it, is owing to the erroneous perception that nature is somewhere, or some state, we need to …
I think this is one of only a handful of poems I have written since moving to Exeter, to study. Somewhat influenced by Camus, his persuasive Absurdism, which to me has always been a methodology to encourage an acceptance of life as ultimately meaningless; this isn't something to despair over. It is only meaningless in …
The title is misleading, sarcastic. This poem is a response to a talk by some guy called Alex Epstein, who started something called The Human Flourishing Project. Alex believes nonrenewable energy sources are the reason for human flourishing. The rise in population (which he seems to think good because that means humanity is flourishing), health, …
This is a motifational poem. The motif motifates the writer, spurring associations to render the poem into a unity, if only a superficial, galvanizing unity. But where would anything be without either motifation or superficilaity? Nature made man & man makes superficial motifations. It's endless. The motif for me is occasioned by a form of …
Been rummaging—again—through the poems I wrote on my return to England. Found this one, with a refrain, a repetition, & repetition is very much puncturing the days without mercy. I don’t recall the exact details of my disposition at the time of writing this. Poems tend to fall into a constellation of activity, a particularly …
My close reading, examines the chapter ‘High Water’ from Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). In this chapter, Deen and Cinta are in Venice. They visit the gentrified Punta della Dogana (Customs House Point), which Cinta remembers was a ‘dilapidated old place’[1] when she was a child. It has become ‘like every other building in …
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I was browsing through the 30 or so poems I wrote—& agonized over the quality of—on my return to England & this one feels cogent to the circumstances we currently find ourselves groaning under. I have been writing about access to futures through the lens of queer theory and ecology. They share a common problem: …
